The rumors were true: Microsoft is indeed buying business-centric social networking site Yammer for $1.2 billion, or $200 million more than early rumors indicated. A presumably pleased Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in a prepared statement that “the acquisition of Yammer underscores our commitment to deliver technology that businesses need and people love” and that “Yammer adds a best-in-class enterprise social networking service to Microsoft’s growing portfolio of complementary cloud services.” Buying Yammer gives Microsoft a strong social networking component to its ubiquitous Office suite since Microsoft now inherits more than 5 million Yammer users across more than 200,000 different companies. In fact, Microsoft is strongly touting Yammer’s ability to mesh with its other services, noting that it “plans to accelerate Yammer’s adoption alongside complementary offerings from Microsoft SharePoint, Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics and Skype.” Hit the jump for the full press release. More →

It seems that Microsoft doesn’t want to let Samsung have all the fun with wild social-networking rumors. Bloomberg on Thursday reported that Microsoft is in talks to buy Yammer, the “freemium” social networking site designed to foster more efficient collaboration among coworkers. Microsoft may pay upwards of $1 billion, unnamed sources told Bloomberg, putting the potential Yammer buy on par with Facebook’s recent acquisition of Instagram. Obviously buying Yammer would give Microsoft a strong social networking component to its Office suite since Microsoft would inherit millions of users across more than 200,000 different companies. The deal for Yammer could be finished as soon as this Friday, Bloomberg said. More →